Tuesday, November 23, 2010

David's recent article on Energy Psychology in Psychotherapy Networker has resulted in an unusual number of letters. Here is a snippet of the correspondence:

"I read with skeptical interest your article on Energy Psychology. You present evidence for the psychological effectiveness of physically stimulating certain points on a patient’s skin, and you propose a mechanism for this involving signals transmitted to the amygdala. But as a physicist, I am interested in your wife’s claims to “see” energy fields associated with those points on the skin. You asked her, "What energy … Electrical … Kinetic, thermal, magnetic, chemical, nuclear?" Did you ever get anything pointing to the possibility of an answer to this central question?

The evidence you present suggests that these so-called “energy” healers have tapped into a physical mechanism for alleviating unwarranted psychological distress. Excellent! But is there any reality to the “energy” they claim to see and “move” through the body?

DAVID'S REPLY:

Thank you for your "skeptical interest." That is more than fair. My best attempts to answer the question you underline are included in the article at http://www.innersource.net/em/images/6_Pillars_of_EM.pdf, with some of the references building the empirical case more than the paper. Western science and Eastern healing traditions are just starting to meet around the issue, and the evidence so far is persuasive to those who are already bought into the "subtle energy" paradigm and less persuasive to those who are not. The book that most persuaded me from the science side was Vibrational Healing, by Richard Gerber, M.D. James Oschman's books might also be of interest. The book that most helped me understand the paradigm from the Eastern perspective was The Web that Has No Weaver: Understanding Chinese Medicine by Ted Kaptchuk. The Field by journalist Lynne McTaggart surveys some of the most interesting studies.